For the third year in a row, my mom made a trip out here from New Jersey to help me garden for a weekend!

Posing in front of our garden work and a rainbow!

It’s hard to believe that this is the third spring that we are living in our first house.  We have done a lot to try to update our sweet little ranch on a hill called Lynwest Drive.  However, I can contribute all of the outside work to two people.  1- Josh for cutting down old overgrown trees and bushes and 2- my mom for beautifying my garden.  I have found that landscaping is a really important skill set to have as a homeowner and without mom, I would be lost.  The past two years, my brother and Dad have helped significantly as well.  I can recall Dad digging holes for new hydrangea and rhododendron and Kevin on the roof with a leaf blower and cleaning our gutters.

I am so fortunate to have such a giving family.  This past weekend especially has given me time to reflect on the importance of my relationship with my mother.  We have an extremely close bond, always have, and I consider her my best friend.  She is the first person I want to call when something important/ funny/ exciting/ traumatic/ and life changing happens.  She is my favorite shopping buddy (one of the only people I enjoy shopping with actually),  and we love to plan vacations together.  We have spent countless hours in a “spa chair” getting pedicures, enjoy our favorite pasta and mussels dish, can lay on the beach in the sun with the best of them,  have high arches and wear heels. We love fresh clean sheets, Clinique, Starbuck’s Grande Mistos, reflecting on my wedding and now, gardening! If we would ever want to deny it, we just couldn’t.  We are mother and daughter.  Now, over the years, we have had our fair share of fights but it is always rooted from love and the fact that we care so much about one another.

My mom has the biggest heart of anyone I know.  She literally wanted to put all 10 puppies in her bed and take care of them.  She would sneak them into a suitcase to New Jersey if she could!  Over the years, she has taught me how to care for others and how to love.  She is supportive in her own way and is never afraid to give her opinion only because she just wants to help.  She is genuinely concerned for me and always offers her help.  She is also the most giving person I know, honestly.  Whether it is her time or a gift for the smallest or largest accomplishment, Mom is always thinking about someone else.

We had an incredible weekend together and couldn’t have planned it better.  We went shopping and both found new bed spreads and jackets, oohed and awwed over the pups, and had the best Ahi Tuna dinner at Malibu Grille.  We even saw a rainbow in my back yard, watched Sex and the City the movie, gardened with pink calla lilies, hydrangea and yellow petunias & most importantly spent a lot of quality time talking.

My beautiful mother

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I would like to leave you with these special quotes-

The older I get,
the more I see
the power of that young woman,
my mother.
~ Sharon Olds

My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being.  I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune.  ~Graycie Harmon

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.  ~Washington Irving

Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother.  A child is a child.  They get bigger, older, but grown?  What’s that suppose to mean?  In my heart it don’t mean a thing.  ~Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987

A daughter is a mother’s gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self.  And mothers are their daughters’ role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.  ~Victoria Secunda

Mom and I on my Wedding Day

Happy Mother’s Day!I love you Mom!